Hi,
It could be deeper Perl, the best guys on this website know what the Perl Interpreter gets up to under the hood. Maybe they look at the Perl source code for this, maybe they just know C, I dont know. Try and refactor your code for speed, its a good way to learn the 'best ways'

UpdatedSteve_p - changed to title back to "Re^2: Learning the Deeper Secrets of Perl"